While the acceptance of electronic payment transactions, such as credit card, debit card, and electronic settlement transactions, has become nearly universal by businesses that sell goods and services to individual consumers, electronic payment transactions are not yet universally accepted by many businesses that mainly supply goods and services to business consumers, such as restaurants, gas stations, etc. In fact, most of the business transactions between suppliers and business consumers remain invoice based, where the supplier issues an invoice to the business consumer for goods provided or services rendered based on a payment term (e.g., 30 days net) and the business consumer pays the invoice by check.
It is particularly noteworthy that most business consumers purchase their primary supplies (i.e., their primary stock in trade) through invoice based spending. Examples of primary supplies are gasoline for a gas station owner, food products for a restaurant owner, or a stock of CDs for a music store owner. These business transactions of primary supplies between business consumers and suppliers are the source of a tremendous amount of spending, because the average dollar amount for each transaction may be orders of magnitude larger than the average transaction conducted by an individual consumer. Moreover, many of the business consumers operate in business segments where only a few, concentrated suppliers provide a large portion of the primary supplies for business consumers in the segment. It follows that business consumers conversely spend a majority of their primary expenses (i.e., expenses for primary supplies) at a small number of concentrated suppliers operating in those business segments. These concentrated suppliers within a business segment may be referred to as oligopolistic business entities.
Thus far, many of the suppliers and business consumers have shunned the use of electronic payment methods for various reasons. Reasons why business consumers may still rely on the traditional paper-based check payments may include force of habit or perceived simplicity.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide improved systems and methods that encourage oligopolistic business entities to accept electronic payment transactions and the business consumers to conduct electronic payment transactions with the oligopolistic business entities.